Category: Uncategorized

With a pandemic at hand, plenty of things have gone wrong. But as I work with my clients, I also notice some things that are going right as leaders work to strengthen their organizations. Leaders are taking actions and initiating changes that will improve their businesses, not just during difficult circumstances, but into the post-pandemic future. Here are six amazing, effective actions leaders are taking right now:  Building Closer Connections: Leaders are maintaining and enhancing connections in the workplace at a time when most people are working remotely, and usually alone. Online meetings and phone calls contain more immediate, in-the moment conversations about feelings, priorities, and actions, which helps employees feel connected, often more so than before the pandemic hit. Discussions about what is happening for people right now, today, are…

There can be great wisdom in a team. In fact, groups are often able to make better decisions than any single individual. But there’s a caveat: only emotional intelligent teams can be this effective. Most of us, at some point, have encountered the other kind of team or group—the type that makes a person want to work alone. When a team is dysfunctional, decision-making, quality, and speed suffer. So it’s an urgent matter to figure out how to create a high performing team, and there’s no magic formula. There is, however, one important area leaders can focus on that, with effort and attention, will always improve a team: group norms. Everyone in a group contributes to its overall emotional intelligence level, but the norms strongly determine whether the team is high-performing, or simply a…

Most of us will hold back at one point or another when we could be leading with our full selves. We have an inkling of where we want to go and what we want to do. We know what we’d be good at, or at least we have a suspicion. Yet, in our everyday lives, we wait to show those vibrant colors inside us until someone invites us to do it. We stay in our current role, waiting for an invitation to further leadership. The most obvious way I observe this in organizations is in people who are headed for a new role, but haven’t yet been given the title. These people know where they’re going, but until they get that title, they consciously or unconsciously stop themselves from acting with…

Recently I worked with a leader who said that he was confused about an important decision he needed to make. We discussed ways he could figure out an answer, but when I saw him next, he said he was still uncertain, and listed for me some of the pros and cons of making one choice or another. I thought he was getting somewhere with a decision, but in the end he postponed yet again. “I just don’t know what I want to do,” he said. He was far from the first person I’d worked with who was stuck in confusion, which can feel like being trapped in clingy mud. I also knew that, deep down, he had an answer about what he should do. I like to say that confusion is the…